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ARCHIVES: The Bush Blunders

(This article by Guy Herron was originally published in the July/August 2003 issue of Newtopia Magazine)

Bush is stupid, and the only people that can’t see it are the ones that are dumber than he is. But it is widely assumed that the people that are pulling his strings are smart. I have given this view some credit myself but lately I have become doubtful. For example, in the matter of world domination;

Population control is not a mysterious art, it is well known, and divide and conquer is rule number one. The Brits called it The Balance of Power and used it successfully on Europe for centuries. It sees a lot of use in American prisons where races are set off against each other and in the country as a whole where problems associated with differences of race, religion and origin are exacerbated by our rulers. Plutocracies everywhere use this tool to keep the people under them from forming into a single community that might see them for what they are and shrug them off like an old coat. The Bush Boys and their coterie have ignored this technique and instead are uniting the countries of the world against us. This is a blunder. We are the strongest nation in the world but we are not stronger than all the nations of the world.

The judicious use of war is another tool of population control. Many herd animals, including us, unite against a common danger, temporarily forgetting our individual differences and aspirations. War has been the premiere control method in the United States for over sixty years and the people have been unaware of it. In 1940 the country had been in a economic depression for close to a decade and a strong movement for social justice had developed. The International Workers of the World (the wobblies) were taking over entire towns in the Northwest. In the coal mining areas of Virginia and Tennessee major fire fights were taking place between miners and National Guard troops. The country had never been so close to a revolution from the left. Our plutocracy helped the Nazi rise in Germany and armed and provoked the Japanese in the Pacific. Then we sucked the Japs into bombing Pearl Harbor and everything was OK again. Our rulers have kept us at war ever since.

Twenty years later the first generation of television kids — those who were raised on the early morality code which didn’t allow bad guys to win and never showed successful criminality — began to judge their parents and the American society — and the Hippies were born. It was a movement that, among other things, was against social hypocrisy and injustice. While there was a generation gap and the parents were aghast at the drugs, the music and the clothes, they did listen to the rhetoric — these were, after all, their kids. “I don’t know dear, maybe Jr. is right and I shouldn’t sell pesticides that are going to give people cancer.” There began a strong groundswell for a better public morality and social justice. This was very dangerous, so the plutocracy created the Viet Nam war. The kids thought the war was wrong and Mom and Dad said “My country, right or wrong.” and the budding alliance was destroyed as the hippy movement was co-opted into the anti-war movement. The war had no other purpose but it served this one very well.

And, of course, there was the Cold War where anything left of center was characterized as “pink” and was assumed to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

The Bush Boys aren’t very good at this ploy. In order for it work properly the true cause and motivation for war must be concealed and the Boys can’t seem to manage this effectively. Increasingly they seem to me to be a bunch swaggering Texas jackasses, high on ambition but short on the brains needed to carry it through. They are dangerous though — a danger to all life on earth.

America has always been a plutocracy but the mailed fist has been concealed in a velvet glove. We think we are free — we are not, we are just on a long leash. We imagine that we govern ourselves. This is asinine on the face of it — as if the work of self government could be done by voting every two years, if that. No, we are governed by the plutocrats and we always have been, while the velvet glove of illusion has kept us sanguine and malleable. But the Bush Boneheads are stripping the glove off and letting the mailed fist show. This is an error and will lead to trouble for them.

At 61, Guy Herron is an ex-student, ex-soldier, ex-logger, ex-construction worker, ex-steelworker, ex-motorcycle deliveryman, ex-motorcycle racer, ex-bouncer, ex-newspaper editor and ex-husband. At present he ekes out a precarious living designing, building and programming manufacturing machinery along with schlepping the occasional pizza. Education; he received his formal maleducation at the University of Utah in the long ago and far away, and has assiduously avoided such places since. Organizations; he has been a member of the Teamsters, Steelworker, Woodworkers unions and the NRA and ACLU as well as the Boy Scouts of America and doesn’t plan on joining anything else again, ever.